In the 19th century its High Street was so poorly maintained that Twiverton was known as Twiverton-on-the-Mud. 'Tubby' Lard (a resident of prefab number seven) gave the local citizenry an untimely reminder of this distant horse-manured and dirt-splattered past when he was let home early from school.
'Tubby' had been feeling a shade below par. Despite experiencing a call of nature he felt unable to summon up the formidable degree of courage needed to use the school lavatory. (Rumour had it that one in ten of those who ventured down the unlit stairs into the lavatory in the basement of Twiverton Village Hall was never seen again.) 'Tubby''s cunning plan was to feign illness. It worked and he was told to make his way home. As he passed the 18th century house in which Henry Fielding had once stayed a pent-up internal implosion - a spontanous 'Tom Jones' of untoppable velocity - burst asunder in his lower ramparts. As the glistening half-liquified substance (a "gift for the mother" was how Sigmund Freud described it) slid its luxurious way 'Tubby's left leg he experienced a moment of surpreme abandon and exhilaration. The memory of this frisson-filled taboo-challenging open-air moment would stay with him until his dying day. When the mood of Apollonian exultation finally subsided 'Tubby' grasped the vulnerability of his predicament and felt intense relief that no one had appeared to observe him. There then
followed a poignant mood reminiscent of post-coital melancholy and a brooding sense of the brevity of human existence. (Years later 'Tubby' would discover poems from Ancient Greece which recorded the same emotional turbulence.)
On reaching Marcus Milligan's small-holding - a small-holding which prefab residents always thought of as a large-holding - 'Tubby' noticed that the local branch of the International Situationists had been hard at work. (They were soon to make it big in Brussels and Paris.) The branch's black and gold paint brush had emblazoned a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) on the fence behind the red telephone kiosk. 'Tubby' Lard was taken aback by what he saw. He wondered whether his outrageous 'Tom Jones' outburst in Twiverton High Street had been observed be someone after all.

"A joke is an epitaph on the death of feeling."